Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize Finalist for the National Book Award Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award Winner of the Howell’s Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters “A great American novel” ( San Francisco Chronicle ) that spans five decades of American history, following the intimate lives of the men and women who lived through them. It begins with a moment of legend: the 1951 baseball game between the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers in which the winning homerun known as the Shot Heard Round the World coincides with news of the Soviet Union’s first hydrogen bomb test. The baseball itself, scuffed and passed from hand to hand, becomes the thread that weaves an astonishing tapestry that spans the Cold War, the Civil Rights Movement, Vietnam protests, and beyond, telling the story of Nick Shay, Klara Sax, and the hidden histories of a nation both haunted and illuminated by its past. Sweeping yet intimate, Underworld is an astonishing story of men and women brought together and torn apart against the backdrop of half a century of American history. "His best novel and perhaps that most elusive of creatures, a great American novel... a masterpiece in which the depth and reach of the commonplace are invested with universal scope and grandeur. Underworld is also a thrilling page-turner." —David Wiegand, The San Francisco Chronicle Book Review " Underworld surges with magisterial confidence through time and through space." —Martin Amis, The New York Times Book Review "The sheer size of the imaginative act and the beauty of its imagery are what is so impressive about this novel…. Underworld is a magnificent book by an American master." —Salman Rushdie "Utterly extraordinary ... in its epic ambition and accomplishment, Underworld calls out for comparison with works that have defined the consciousness of their age." —Melvin Jules Bukiet, Chicago Tribune Books "You pick up and travel with DeLillo anywhere—the bliss of a baseball game, the meeting of old lovers in a desert. He offers us another history of ourselves. He smells the music in argument and brag. He throws the unbitten coin of fame back at us. This book is an aria and a wolf-whistle of our half-century. It contains multitudes." — Michael Ondaatje "DeLillo understands the capacity of words to elevate us above the mundane, to establish a distance from things and a mastery over them, a power emerging from the capacity given to Adam, the ability to name." —Steven E. Alford, Houston Chronicle "Reading DeLillo's books bolsters our belief in the art of fiction: one bright shining sentence after another." —Paul Elie, Elle "For those who love eloquent prose and powerful ideas, Underworld is an eight-course meal. .. . A n eye-opener, a consciousness-raising treatise on modern America by a writer in love with the power of words." —Dorman T. Shindler, The Denver Post " Underworld soars. Bigger and richer than anything Do n DeLillo has done before, this multicharacter, time-leaping, sea-to-shining-sea dissection of American life is perilously good—so good, so strong, deep, knowing and funny." —Phil Hanrahan, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel " Underworld , DeLillo's richest and most ambitious novel, seeks nothing less than the secret truths of modern America. " —Gary Lee Stonum, The Plain Dealer Don DeLillo is the author of seventeen novels including Underworld, Zero K, Libra, and White Noise, and the story collection The Angel Esmeralda, a finalist for the Story Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. He has also written plays and essays. He has won the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the PEN/Saul Bellow Award, the Jerusalem Prize for his complete body of work, the William Dean Howells Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and, in 2025, the Academy's Gold Medal for Fiction. DeLillo has been awarded the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction and the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. From Part 5, Better Things For Better Living Through Chemistry: Selected Fragments Public and Private in the 1950s and 1960s, Chapter 3, January 11, 1955 We were about thirty miles below the Canadian border in a rambling encampment that was mostly barracks and other frame structures, a harking back, maybe, to the missionary roots of the order -- except the natives, in this case, were us. Poor city kids who showed promise; some frail-bodied types with photographic memories and a certain uncleanness about them; those who were bright but unstable; those who could not adjust; the ones whose adjustment was ordained by the state; a cluster of Latins from some Jesuit center in Venezuela, smart young men with a cosmopolitan style, freezing their weenies off; and a few farmboys from not so far away, shyer than borrowed suits. "Sometimes I think the education we dispense is bette